Blogging for Business

In a post at the end of last year, Des Walsh on his excellent new B5 Media blog, Business and Blogging, picked out a post by Ben Yoskovitz which focused on the argument that business blogging is not a sales pitch but rather a meaningful conversation.

You’ll get no argument from me on the “Sales pitch” front. There are lots of excellent direct marketing and sales tools available to businesses but a business blog is not one of them. You’re quite simply not playing to its strengths if you try to use it in that way.

However, a conversation (meaningful or otherwise) is only useful, from a business perspective, if it leads somewhere. The conversation shouldn’t try to lead straight to an attempted sale – in fact it mustn’t, you’re back to direct selling again there. Nevertheless, to be properly effective, it should have a direction and be taking you towards your desired outcome, whether that is developing the relationship, encouraging a news feed sign up, setting up a face to face meeting etc.

Ben also makes the point that:

“It’s not about telling people why you’re great and why they should do business with you.”

Agreed. But if you shift the emphasis slightly then you get a concept which is much more valid for blogs. For me:

“It’s about demonstrating to people why you’re great (or helping people find out why you’re great) and why they should do business with you.”

Don’t tell them, but do make it easy for them to find out through what you write and the way that you write it. For me this comes down to the distinction between selling to someone (an individual or a business) and helping them to decide that they want to buy from you.

If you do this well, then hopefully you’ll find that you don’t need to go and tell people why you are great because you’ll have others doing that on your behalf, either in their own blogs, on their sites or face to face. And that’s probably the clearest sign that you are running a valuable and well focused business blog.

The Blog Coach: new and improved

Well it’s finally time to get The Blog Coach back on the road, so welcome to the new and updated version of the site!

We will be looking at all aspects of blogging from the planning and design of blogs and blogsites which deliver on their business objectives, through to their marketing and ongoing development. In all cases, the focus will be firmly focused on the business aspect – not in terms of monetising your blog with adverts and the like, but in using a blog to develop business for your company.

The Blog Coach blogsite is designed and aimed at three main groups:

• corporates, small business and solopreneurs which are either planning or merely thinking about setting up a business blog to work for their businesses;
• those companies looking for ways to develop and/or market a blog which they have already set up for their business;
• anyone interested in understanding more about how to use the Social Media Marketing Toolkit they have at their disposal.

While it isn’t specifically aimed at experienced individual bloggers, I hope that The Blog Coach will be able to offer you something as well and I would welcome comments and feedback from you so that it can be shared with others.

In addition to the main categories which will help you identify areas of particular interest, there are also some guiding categories which will help to give focus to the posts. These will be:

• Planning and Setting up a Blog
• Writing and Developing your Blog
• Business Blog Marketing
• Blogging for your Business
• Corporate Blogging
• New Media / Social Media Marketing Toolkit

Although it will be aimed at and looking at the use of blogging in business sense and how to make it work for you, I hope that people running individual blogs will certainly gain from some of the sections.

So, whatever stage you are at with your Business Blogging, I invite you to dip in on a regular basis – to make that as easy as possible, why not add The Blog Coach to your favourite RSS Reader as well? Hopefully you’ll find the areas that we’re going to be discussing useful as well as interesting, and that you’ll feel the urge to join in!

I look forward to hearing from you.

Comments: encourage, accept and reply

In my opinion, one of the key characteristics of your Blog and one that you need to work with is the ability for people to comment on what you have posted. Some people take an even more rigid view and say that it is not really a blog without this!

This facility on your blog helps to open up and develop channels of communications between yourself and your readers and can be the perfect way of starting a business relationship. For some blogs, the comments (and what they can lead to) are the main reason they are written in the first place.

So, contrary to some views I hear in organisations thinking about using a blog, your decision should not be whether to allow comments or not, but rather how to elicit comments and how to best handle the ones you receive. Whether you moderate them or allow your visitors to comment freely (having filtered out the spam comments of course – Akismet is great for this), you should consider the fact that people want to comment and want to get involved to be a compliment to your post.

You should also look to encourage it. Ask an open question at the end of your post which is actively looking for responses – this will give people something to focus on in the responses. If you are talking to someone about a subject that you have written on, refer them to the post and ask them to join in and give their view as well.

You should also aim to respond to the comments that are made – after all, you are writing to pique people’s interest in your subject and looking to engage with your readers, so if they respond and ask a question then make sure that you reply to it.

Of course, there are going to be occasions where the comments will not be favourable – this is to be expected. You cannot please all the people all of the time. However, in all but the most extreme cases (I’m thinking primarily here about libellous comments), you really should allow the comments to appear and respond to their points by presenting your point of view. While tempting, it’s best not to ignore this type of comment: after all, you are there to put forward and argue your point of view and you will often gain greater respect by handling objections with grace and tact in this way.

So, comments, and the interaction they bring, are a key element of what make a Business Blog so effective. If you were ever considering not allowing comments then I would urge you to rethink because you would be slamming the door shut on some of the key relationship building opportunities you’ll get.

How do you encourage comments on your blog?

Blogging in the News – w/e 15 Oct

Britain’s Blogging ‘A’ List

which gives a list of the Top UK bloggers. This is ranked according to the number of links that they receive as measured by Technorati, one of the leading Blog Search Engines.

Mass Blogging Day to Promote History Campaign

which is encouraging people to participate in leaving their thoughts about a day in their life this coming Tuesday.

Blogging ‘un-Christian’ – shock

presents another view on the use of blogging.

Parties bin Posters in favour of blogs

which indicates some political parties deciding that Blogs would be more effective than posters to get their message across. Baaaa!

Keyword phrase selection: some helpful tools

You should always write first and foremost for your readers – that is a rule which is key to achieving a successful blog. However, a blog is also an important tool in getting good rankings in the Search Engines for keyword phrases which are important to us and our businesses.

We know that identifying the best keyword phrases is going to be key to our efforts to get better rankings through Search Engine Optimisation. This will allow us to focus our articles at areas which we know will appeal bot to our readers and to the Search Engines at the same time. It can also help to achieve a more comprehensive coverage in our chosen area by identifying keyword phrases in adjacent areas that are relevant to what we offer.

To help in this task and find the best keyword phrases, there are a number of tools available to help us achieve this and a lot of them are free!

Here are ones that I have looked at and consider worthwhile.

WordTracker
Probably the best known tool in the field and self styled “Leading Keyword Research Tool”. It is charged for, although there is a limited free trial, but it is also very complete in what it offers across a number of Search Engines.

Google AdWords: Keyword Tool
Gives ideas for new keywords associated with your target phrase but does not indicate relevance or give details of number or frequency of searches

Overture Keyword Selector Tool
Returns details of how many searches have been carried out in the Overture engine over the period of a month and allows a drill down into associated keywords containing your keyword phrase as well.

NicheBot
NicheBot has a mix of Wordtracker and Overture based tools as well as a nice keyword analysis tool which focuses on Google’s results

Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool
One of a set of tools available at the Digital Point website – this engine gives search numbers on keywords from Wordtracker and Overture sources

In addition to these, although some of the keyword tools mentioned above already include it, I would also recommend taking a look through a Thesaurus (online or paperback) to open up other avenues. Sometimes you just can’t beat going back to basics!